True Story

Writer-director Gary Hoffman's "Bonnie and Clyde: The True Story" (at 8 tonight on KTTV-TV Channel 11 and XETV-TV Channel 6) is a well-cast and largely entertaining account of the brief lives of the legendary outlaws that nevertheless is an opportunity missed.

When Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green announced last fall that they'd sit out the current season of "The Voice" -- which premiered Monday night on NBC with Shakira and Usher as the new judges -- both singers said they planned to spend more time focusing on music. Yet three months after they vacated their red-pleather judges' chairs, the two don't have much to show for it: Aguilera's "Lotus" album bombed (despite an awesomely freaky performance at the American Music Awards), while Green is starring in a coolly received production at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas.

Playground The Mostly True Story of a Former Bully 50 Cent with Laura Moser Razorbill: 242 pp., $18.99, ages 12 and up The boy who grew up to be the gangster-rap superstar 50 Cent has been more than open about his troubled youth. Raised by a single mother, who dealt cocaine and was murdered when he was just 12, 50 Cent started dealing drugs and carrying guns in middle school. But that isn't the story he tells in his young-adult debut, "Playground: The Mostly True Story of a Former Bully.

"Catch Me If You Can" is a splashy new musical based on the hit DreamWorks film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It's also based on the true story of Frank W. Abagnale Jr., a runaway teenager who tries to buy fame and fortune using millions of dollars of forged checks, and the FBI agent who chases him down. The Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. Times and prices vary. Through Sun. (323) 468-1770; http://www.broadwayla.org .

When Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green announced last fall that they'd sit out the current season of "The Voice" -- which premiered Monday night on NBC with Shakira and Usher as the new judges -- both singers said they planned to spend more time focusing on music. Yet three months after they vacated their red-pleather judges' chairs, the two don't have much to show for it: Aguilera's "Lotus" album bombed (despite an awesomely freaky performance at the American Music Awards), while Green is starring in a coolly received production at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas.

They say I write black and love death and madness. Art is for the few. The rare as poets, mutes or the survivors of surgery. I am speaking of blood matters, passion, risking everything, leaving a husband and children (this is a true story) to fly to Caracas with a part-time dance instructor named Ramon. I woke up broke in an speakable port regretting nothing. I lived for his cha-cha his rumba, the light glancing off his pointed and shined black shoes. We boogied for months.

Compliance Magnolia, $26.98; Blu-ray, $29.98 Available on VOD beginning Jan. 8 Craig Zobel's film dramatizes that bizarre news story from a few years back about a restaurant manager who forced an employee to strip on the orders of a man impersonating a policeman. Dreama Walker plays the luckless cashier, who by the end of the night is coerced into doing naked jumping jacks in a stockroom (and worse) because her boss (played by the remarkable Ann Dowd) tells her that a cop has accused her of stealing.

On my very first day as a newspaperman, an editor whose breath stank of cheap cigars forever imprinted on me the profession's devotion to factual accuracy. I'd been assigned to write obituaries. One of those I wrote that day stated, in accord with the death notice from the funeral home, that the deceased had lived at such-and-such address in such-and-such town. "You sure that address is in the city limits?" the editor snarled. He jerked his thumb toward a stack of local street directories.

As someone who has at different times covered the entertainment industry as a reporter and also worked in the business, I feel compelled to raise a few points about Patrick Goldstein's surprisingly studio-friendly column that appeared Dec. 19 ("History Is Only the Launch Pad"). His subject: films inspired by real-life events that come under attack (rightly or wrongly) by the media for playing loose with the facts--pictures such as "The Hurricane," "JFK," "Amistad" and "The Insider."

"Anything to Survive" (at 9 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) is a physically compelling production about a family's will to live when their boat sinks in an Alaskan inlet and they're washed ashore on a forbidding and remote island in the dead of winter. The story, which covers 24 hellish days, is true. The fear of death from pain, sub-freezing weather and starvation is relentless, and the indifference of nature is implacable.

On May 19, 1836, a force of Comanche warriors accompanied by their Kiowa and Kochi allies attacked Ft. Parker in central Texas. Besides killing several of the residents of the fort, the Comanches kidnapped five captives, including 9-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. For years, her uncle James Parker tried and ultimately failed to find her. Cynthia Ann stayed with the Comanches for 25 years, marrying a warrior and having three children, including the legendary Quanah Parker, a famed Comanche chief and leader of the Native American Church.

If you believe the trailers, "Snitch," the new crime drama starring Dwayne Johnson, is a jampacked action thriller. His weapon of choice: a giant snarling big rig, all the better to run the bad guys down. But what the movie is really about is a war-on-drugs tactic that offers early release to convicts willing to snitch on someone else. Though 18-wheelers and reckless driving are definitely involved, there is not nearly as much action as most fans of the increasingly polished Rock will be expecting.

The risk with basing any novel on a true story is that - as the saying goes - truth is so frequently stranger than fiction. Choosing to novelize the curious tale of Christian Gerhartsreiter, the Rockefeller impersonator and con man who abducted his own daughter in 2009, is a particularly gutsy move. So it's a testament to Amity Gaige's deftness as an author that her new novel, "Schroder," is a fascinating psychological portrait of love, longing and self-loathing - despite the countless magazine articles and TV special reports that Gerhartsreiter's exploits have already inspired.

PARK CITY, Utah - Writer Doris Lessing was 92 years old when French filmmaker Anne Fontaine met her last year, and she made quite an impression. "She's wild," Fontaine says. "She has a look I'd never seen before: eyes that go into your head, like a fakir, so intense, not hiding anything. " The two women were speaking because Fontaine was going to turn Lessing's novella "The Grandmothers" into a film and the Nobel Prize-winning author had some unexpected advice for adapting her story of two women looking back on their lives.

The 2013 edition of the Sundance Film Festival opens Thursday night, but if you think a consensus has formed about the nature of this year's event, you would be wrong. While the Hollywood Reporter said the main story is a lineup "heavy on big names from the film and television worlds," Daily Variety provocatively insisted "Sex Drives 'Dance: Park City slate stocked with frisky fare. " This paper has noted that in the competition, fully half of the narrative features were made by women, while the New York Times claimed that the Utah festival, "known for championing dark and inscrutable films, has unveiled an unusually accessible - and sellable - competition lineup.

Compliance Magnolia, $26.98; Blu-ray, $29.98 Available on VOD beginning Jan. 8 Craig Zobel's film dramatizes that bizarre news story from a few years back about a restaurant manager who forced an employee to strip on the orders of a man impersonating a policeman. Dreama Walker plays the luckless cashier, who by the end of the night is coerced into doing naked jumping jacks in a stockroom (and worse) because her boss (played by the remarkable Ann Dowd) tells her that a cop has accused her of stealing.

I've gotten so used to seeing Alan Cumming as high-end attorney Eli Gold, fighting cerebral battles for a compromised politician on CBS' "The Good Wife," that he's almost unrecognizable as the vamping drag queen in "Any Day Now. " Cumming's chameleon quality serves him well in this intimate family drama. It centers on rough-around-the-edges Rudy, who barely covers the rent performing in a 1970s-era gay bar and finds himself unexpectedly in love and in a custody battle over a special-needs child.

There's a thin line between desperation and inspiration, at least according to Ben Lewin, director of "The Sessions. " The film tells the mostly true story of Mark O'Brien (played by John Hawkes), a 38-year-old journalist and poet confined to an iron lung who enlists a sex surrogate (Helen Hunt) to help him lose his virginity. At a recent installment of the Envelope Screening Series hosted by Times film reporter John Horn, Lewin shared the film's origin story. "I think like a lot of worthy enterprises, it starts with an act of desperation," he said.